Student transportation issues addressed by board, provider

Prior to any public meeting Wednesday night, Student Transportation Specialists’ managing consultant Dave Schultz was advising several members of the board of changes in their districts.
“We have been systematically inputting the bus card data into our system,” said Schultz during Wednesday’s Budget/Finance Committee meeting.
The Iota area is set for re-routing and it is one of several projects STS is working to better address Acadia’s needs. Next up on the agenda is addressing the Church Point/Richard areas resources, which are spread very thin.
“We have already begun and have the student data entered for Church Point and Richard and that will be the next area we [will work on],” said Schultz. “We already know the Richard resources are sorely stretched.”
In the Iota area, the changes are projected to take effect within the coming weeks after STS reviews the proposed new routes with the bus drivers in the area and then alerts affected parents/families.
Iota, for some time, has had an issue of overcrowding concerning buses and their routes.
Schultz has made it a point to collect all bus cards from the parish to begin inputting all the data into its system for a better visual of where children are located and coming from. Through its go-to tool, Transfinder, STS has gotten a better visual of where the approximately 660 students in the area registered to ride buses.
Now Schultz, along with input from Transfinder and bus drivers, looks to create better, more efficient routes.
Currently, there are 10 buses used in the area, with several pulling more than one route. According to Schultz, that breaks down to roughly 55 students per bus, a rather high number in a kindergarten through 12th grade district area.
“For a K-12 district, where you have big kids, small kids, that’s a pretty good load,” he said.
With hopes of concluding that project in the coming weeks, the focus will then turn eastward to the Church Point and Richard areas where resources have been stretched to their thinnest.
Schultz believes that STS can look at how those resources are currently deployed and use them better.
As he concluded his report, Schultz added that STS is working on better ways to communicate with its drivers and retrieving paperwork, both of which are problems, in part, due to distance.
He also wants to improve STS’s notification system. Ultimately, if a bus breaks down, a route changes or there is an accident that can/will affect bus travel, it is STS’s responsibility to notify the family, or families, effected. He does believe, however, that schools can be an effective communication tool in that process.
Other concerns were addressed including reliability of cameras in the buses and monitoring/parking of buses during the summertime.
Schultz proposed taking a more proactive approach, particularly in regard to the cameras.